Boozy, Floozy, and Woozy

One film featured the prolific Tyler Perry in Mama's Family orthopedic drag (floral print housedress, gray wig, glasses, and no-nonsense disposition) setting our penal system straight, the other promised to be an atmospheric romantic love triangle involving the poet Dylan Thomas set against the smoke and rubble and blackouts of the Blitz.

The Edge of Love won, and we lost. Because it was barely five minutes into this preening, pancake-syrup pastiche that we had made a mistake, and kissed away $4.99 on a clunker. Some romantic triangle--more like a menage a twat. From The Edge of Love you would have thought the purpose of World War II and the Blitz was to confer glamour by the bucket loads on its characters as they posed every so jauntily on steep staircases that would have done German Expressionism proud and stand silhouetted against slats of light slicing through secretive shadows (ditto). Visually, the film is the strangest mix of classic Powell-Pressburger and postmodern cut-and-paste, the opening shot of Keira Knightley crooning to the camera a Dorothy Lamour fantasy shot as a Kylie Minogue video, the vibrant tropical colors and rubied lipstick an ironic counterpoint to the grotty dark of the Underground and the bombed debris. But what is the point of the irony, and whose Technicolor fantasy is it--Knightley's singer's vision of Hollywood stardom, the besotted wet dream of the men in uniform watching her, the cinematographer's, whose? It's an animated postcard that relates to nothing else going on, not that the filmmakers provide incentive to deciphering who's striking all these attitudes in the Citizen Kane cavernous interiors and why we should care about boozy Dylan Thomas and his slattern wife (played by Sienna Miller as if she's auditioning for the role she's already got, every line-reading and gesture a shade too hyper). Each time Dylan opened his plummy mouth and to intone his oracular poetry for us pigeons, it was almost enough to make you hate poetry, if this wind-blown tosh was the result. As for Keira Knightley--Ikea Knightley, as she's been called--she keeps making those ferret faces when she smiles and cocking her cigarettes as if imitating some screen legend, and I'm sorry, a smoking ferret is--

Oh my, as Dick Enberg would say, Melanie Oudin just knocked Maria Sharapova out of the U.S. Open in an epic battle. I worship Sharapova--her poise, her height, her focus, her furious fight, her regal bearing--and yet there's no denying Oudin played a sensational match, never buckled under pressure, and her victory no fluke: congratulations. Between this match and Taylor Dent's five-set display of warriordom last night, the Open has finally combusted into excitement. If this keeps up, who knows, even John McEnroe may begin to sound undisgruntled.